I’ve been reading Theo’s new book Scalable Internet Architectures, which isn’t actually particularly new any more. I have had very little time to read so far this year.

Anyways, I’ve finally read enough of it to give a review. Sorry it’s taken so long, Theo.

The book consists of three kinds of content. There’s the “Yeah, I knew that” stuff, which is by far the minority of the content. There’s the “That’s cool, but applies to a MUCH larger infrastructure than I’ll ever be condemned to manage”, which is also in a minority. Then there’s the vast majority of the book, which is “Wow, that’s immediately applicable, and immediately beneficial” stuff.

Theo talks about situations encountered at customers, and, although the situations themselves are different from what I will ever encounter, the solutions that he implemented have insight in them that do apply to situations that I encounter all the time, from deploying new code, to working with a team, to backup and recovery.

Having attended Theo’s talks at various conferences, and heard many of these stories, I wasn’t sure what I’d get from the book, but the book is rich with content that was only hinted at in his talks.

This book goes on my “highly recommended” list if you are at all involved in deploying and/or maintaining code or hardware, in any environment from a small business on up. Theo’s experience is extensive, with real-world customers, trying to solve real problems, not theoretical ones, and what he has learned isn’t the standard text-book solution, but things that actually work when the scenario doesn’t behave like the text-book ones.

So, go get it right away and then come to ApacheCon so that he can sign it for you.